I have been a big fan of the Huffington Post since it sprang onto the scene back in 2005.  But recently, I have noticed a disturbingly high number of seriously uninformed, pseudoscientific articles presented as legitimate science—anti-vaccination quackery, reality denyers, and Deepak Chopra's ramblings on intelligent design.

In his Intelligent Design Without the Bible, Deepak begins by establishing his credentials as an authority on the subject of intelligent design vs. evolution; namely, that he was asked to appear on CNN's Larry King Live Show.  He then goes on to explain that ID and evolution are not at odds with one another and suggests that even Einstein said as much by (incorrectly) invoking "a fascinating theory called the anthropic principle" (which, apparently, Deepak also does not understand, either—but I digress.)  Completely misusing the anthropic principle, Deepak trots out the tired and thoroughly debunked anti-evolution argument:

"To say the DNA happened randomly is like saying that a hurricane could blow through a junk yard and produce a jet plane."

Uh, no, its not at all like saying that.  It is like saying that because I can step up a 1/4 inch step, I can, eventually, walk up Mt. Rainier.  Nobody (who actually understands the theory of evolution) seriously suggests that a random event created an eye, a wing, a kidney, a brain, or a human all in one step!  Evolution is a slow, incremental process.  A process that slowly raises the complexity of systems through differential survival rates.  Evolution is a crane, not a skyhook.

Then Deepak raises a series of the twelve main issues to be considered by anyone "interested in placing the debate on a higher plane than us-versus-them" (ah, the old  12 steps formula).  As you might anticipate already, every single one of the twelve "issues" is presented as a question that further demonstrates Deepak's lack of study in this area.  Any student of evolution will easily see the fallacy in each question.

12 Steps to Misunderstanding Evolution

1. How does nature take creative leaps?
   (It doesn't.  It takes billions of teeny tiny little steps; the ones in the direction of improved fitness are more likely to be reproduced.)
2. If mutations are random, why does the fossil record demonstrate so many positive mutations -- those that lead to new species -- and so few negative ones?
   (A very low percentage of living animals are preserved as fossils.  Animals with negative mutations, by definition, were less likely to reproduce making them less likely to have an opportunity to be fossilized.)
3. How does evolution know where to stop?
   (It does not.  It has no intention whatsoever.  Mutations are random.)
4. How could one kind of cell take three different routes purely at random?
   (Random mutation creates changes in random directions.  There are (way) more than three possible directions.)
5. If design doesn't imply intelligence, why are we so intelligent?
   (This is a non sequitur. If cheese is made from milk, why is GM losing money?)
6. Why do forms replicate themselves without apparent need?
   (Because it is possible.  Why does a rolled die sometimes come up 2?)
7. If the oxygen doesn't change physically -- and it doesn't -- what invisible change causes it to acquire intelligence the instant it contacts life?
   (It does not become intelligent.  It becomes engaged in a system that includes many physical parts interacting in complex ways.)
8. How can whole systems appear all at once?
   (This is the tired old argument regarding holes in the fossil record.  Yes, there are gaps.  There will always be gaps.  Finding a new fossil to fill a gap actually creates two new, albeit smaller, gaps.  However, the fossil record is huge and has accurately predicted the existence of forms that were later discovered as fossils.)
9. Darwin's iron law was that evolution is linked to survival, but it was long ago pointed out that "survival of the fittest" is a tautology.
   (Once understood, any invariably true statement becomes a tautology, by definition.  This is the very brilliance of Darwin's idea.  Yes, this is how evolution works.  Those forms that survive provide the raw materials from which incrementally different forms may descend.  This is true.)
10. At the moment of stinging, a honeybee dies. In what way is this a survival mechanism, given that the bee doesn't survive at all?
    (This question misunderstands survival of a genotype vs. survival of a phenotype.  The genes that lead an individual honeybee to sting in a given situation are shared by vast numbers of individual bees.  Experience with bees' ability and propensity to sting leads other creatures—humans, dogs, monkeys, etc.—to be more respectful of bees.  The overall net effect is increased probability that the "stinging" gene will be reproduced, even if an occasional carrier of that gene dies.)
11. How did symbiotic cooperation develop?
    (See The Extended Phenotype for a good discussion of this issue.)
12. Finally, why are life forms beautiful?
    (Another non sequitur, but beauty really is in the eye of the beholder.  There is no universal, absolute definition of beauty.  Are all life forms beautiful?  Does every person agree that all life forms are beautiful?  This is an ill defined question.)

I am very, very curious to know what aspects of the theory of evolution Deepak has actually studied. How has he educated himself in this area?  Has he read any of Richard Dawkins' books on the subject?  Books like, The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, The River Out of Eden, Climbing Mt. Improbable, or The Extended Phenotype?  Each of these is easily accessible to non-scientists, and this is just a few examples from a single author.  There are many, many more.  Any intelligent person that read and understood even one of these books, would not assemble such a list of twelve "issues."

No, Deepak Chopra does not understand the theory of evolution.

I just received an insightful e-mail from a good friend, Alan Kucheck.  I first met Alan at Starbase, where he was VP of Engineering and subsequently became my boss after Starbase acquired Genitor.  From my very first pre-acquisition due diligence telephone call with Alan, I sensed that Alan was an outside the box thinker with a gift for seeing things the way they are and the way things ought to be.  This morning's e-mail, reproduced below with Alan's blessing, is just another example of that.

Twitter in the workplace...

Like browsers a [very] long time ago and Facebook more recently, Twitter in the workplace is often deemed unproductive activity and, therefore, frowned upon.

Since necessity is the mother of invention, enter Spreadtweet.

Attached is a screenshot from my Mac.  Written in Adobe Air, it looks just like Excel on the Mac [and native on Windows as well] except for that strange toolbar with the buttons like "Replies" and "Direct Messages" and serves as a camouflage for your unsanctioned activity in case the boss strolls by - Andy will find this particularly useful.

People will do what they need to do - swimming against the tide only ends up producing waste heat.  The context reminds me of the old Malvina Reynolds song, "God Bless the Grass" [Andy, Judy, and I are old enough to remember, but the rest of you were not yet in diapers]:

God bless the grass that grows through the crack.
They roll the concrete over it to try and keep it back.
The concrete gets tired of what it has to do,
It breaks and it buckles and the grass grows thru,
And God bless the grass.

God bless the truth that fights toward the sun,
They roll the lies over it and think that it is done
It moves through the ground and reaches for the air,
And after a while it is growing everywhere,
And God bless the grass.

God bless the grass that breaks through cement,
It's green and its tender and it's easily bent,
But after a while it lifts up its head,
For the grass is living and the stone is dead.
And God bless the grass.

God bless the grass that's gentle and low
Its roots they are deep and its will is to grow.
And God bless the truth, the friend of the poor,
And the wild grass growing at the poor man's door,
And God bless the grass.

And now, it seems, there could be a new verse.

I just finished reading Tinu Abayomi-Paul's excellent article How Will Oprah’s Audience Affect Twitter? (and watching the associated video.)  As usual, she got me to thinking...

Twitter is a new application platform. And its hard (impossible, really) to accurately predict what smart people will do with a platform. How Twitter is being used today is different than it was 18 months (approximately, the Moore doubling period) ago and than it will be in another 18 months.

I know some people may think I’m crazy, but I believe Twitter deserves its place in the list that includes the web, cell phones, telephone, radio, telegraph, postal service, etc. These are all technologies that changed the communication playing field, literally. Each of these changed the rules for who could communicate with whom and at what velocity. Each of these literally changed the world.

Having Oprah on board is newsworthy, but its hardly significant in the big scheme. Twitter was already a game changer. I sensed this back in January in my post Why I Use Twitter.

What do you think?  Am I crazy?  Leave a comment below or tweet me.

Ann Arbor is rarely lacking for something fun and/or unusual to do, and today was no exception.  Below are several iPhone photos of the Festifools happenings a few minutes ago on Main Street.  You can find the full gallery of shots on SmugMug.

The idea behind FollowFriday is simple.  Every Friday, Twitter users recommend a few of their friends for others to follow.  They simply tweet (i.e., post a short message to Twitter) with the names of their recommended friends along with the hash tag #followfriday which serves to tag the tweet, making it easy for others to find.

In the old days—like two or three months ago, which is two or three Twitter eons—I found FollowFriday to be generally quite useful.  A typical tweet might look something like this:

Follow @bfrench and @BudGibson for Web 2.0 insights; @AAObserver to keep tabs on Ann Arbor happenings. #followfriday

Now that is a genuinely useful tweet.  That tweet provides some insight into why (or why not) you might want to follow the recommended people.

Unfortunately, now, most FollowFriday tweets look more like this:

@JohnZajaros @xemanhdep @rossmulcahy @ArticlesFYI @dmahutchinson @lingokid @aaronaiken @faseidl @campaignstace #followfriday

This has two problems:

1. Who cares?
2. Who notices?

Who cares?

Without annotation of any kind, all I know about a long list of recommendations is that the person doing the recommendation follows these people (presumably).  But, in most cases, I don't want to follow everyone that every one of my friends follows.  I mean, what's the point.  If that were a good thing, why not just follow the public timeline?

I want to follow people that are interesting—to me.  Maybe one of my friends, who I follow because she is really funny and a good rational thinker, follows an expert in dog grooming because she is also really into dog grooming.  I am not into dog grooming and, while the dog groomer may share wonderful insights into dog grooming techniques, I'm simply not interested in that.

Who notices?

The idea behind FollowFriday is to broadcast your (hopefully annotated) recommendations to all of your followers.  But in an effort to jam as many non-annotated recommendations as possible into Twitter's 140 character limit, people are inadvertently  creating "@" replies that limit who sees the tweet in the first place.

Let me explain.

In Twitter, tweets are generally seen by everyone that follows you.  The exception is when you begin a tweet with an @-sign and a username (as in the second tweet example above.)  Such tweets are called "@ replies" (or "at replies") and they are intended to be a direct reply to someone.  Such tweets are seen only by the recipient and by anyone that follows both the sender and the recipient.  So, for example, the second tweet above is not seen by all of the sender's followers.

How to fix FollowFriday

To use an in-vogue term, FollowFriday has jumped the shark.  But its not too late to turn things around and make FollowFriday useful again, if people follow a few very simple FollowFriday guidelines:

1. Do not start a FollowFriday tweet with an @-sign.
2. Give a brief annotation for each recommended person.
3. Include the #followfriday hash tag.

A simple means of accomplishing both points 1 and 3 is to start the tweet with #followfriday.

Point 2 means that you can only recommend a few people in a single tweet but the tweet will actually be useful.  If you really want to recommend more people, simply use multiple tweets.

So, now that you know how to make a good FollowFriday tweet, you can help this idea to un-jump the shark by issuing useful FollowFriday tweets.